Iconostasis

An iconostasis is a wall or screen covered in icons that fully separates the sanctuary, where the altar stands, from the nave in an Eastern Orthodox church, replacing the partial screens or rood screens found in Western church traditions with a solid, floor-to-near-ceiling barrier organized entirely around a fixed program of sacred images.

The arrangement of icons on a fully developed iconostasis follows a standardized order rather than an arbitrary decorative scheme: the Royal Doors at the center, through which only clergy pass, are flanked by icons of Christ and the Theotokos, with additional tiers above typically presenting the twelve great feasts of the liturgical year, the apostles, and often the Old Testament prophets, so that the entire structure functions as a theologically organized visual summary of salvation history standing between the congregation and the altar. Rather than concealing the sanctuary from the congregation in the sense of hiding it, Orthodox theology understands the iconostasis as revealing the sanctuary through sanctified image, the icons functioning as windows onto the sacred reality taking place beyond the screen rather than as an obstruction blocking it from view, a framing that distinguishes the iconostasis conceptually from a simple opaque partition wall.

The iconostasis did not begin as the tall, solid wall familiar in Orthodox churches today; earlier Byzantine churches used a low barrier called a templon, often little more than a waist-high or chest-high colonnaded screen hung with a limited number of icons and curtains, which still allowed the congregation a fairly direct view into the sanctuary during the liturgy. Over the course of the middle and late Byzantine periods, and especially in the Russian Orthodox tradition from around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries onward, this low templon was progressively built up, tier by tier, with additional rows of icons until it became the essentially solid, fully enclosing wall now standard across most Orthodox churches, a development art historians associate partly with an increasing theological and devotional emphasis on the icon itself as a primary vehicle of sacred presence within the church.

Because the fully developed iconostasis is a comparatively late refinement of what began as a much more open screen, its degree of solidity and height still varies somewhat by regional tradition and period, with some Greek and other Orthodox churches retaining a lower, more open iconostasis closer to the earlier templon form even as the tall Russian-style wall became the form most widely recognized internationally as characteristic of Orthodox church architecture.